Jason White is director of search at Victorious, the SEO agency, where he leads the SEO and content strategy teams. He has worked in search for about 20 years, at boutique and global agencies and in-house, leading SEO for the Hertz, Dollar, and Thrifty car rental brands and later for the insurance marketplace Policygenius. He is known for treating server logs as the most reliable way to see how AI crawlers read a website.
From a Bike Shop to SEO
He found search by accident. On the Tech Marketing Rewired podcast in April 2025 he said that about 20 years earlier he was working at a bike shop and selling its inventory on eBay, which went well enough that "I was able to make rent a couple of times." He started reading about the terms behind what he was doing and learned there was a field called SEO. He was studying physical education at the time, and "that's kind of where everything took like a hard right turn."
He wanted to work in paid search at a local agency in upstate New York, but could not get an interview on that team. He got one on the SEO team instead. He later worked at large global agencies on accounts he named as Kohler, Ralph Lauren, Tory Burch, and Motel 6, and helped launch the TikTok for Business blog.
In-House at Hertz and Policygenius
On the brand side he led SEO for Hertz and its Dollar and Thrifty brands, where, he said, the company focused heavily on Net Promoter Scores from its customers. He called that kind of customer survey data "such a juicy data point to be giving to an AI engine," and said companies should make sure it can be found and indexed. By 2025 he was head of SEO at Policygenius, before joining Victorious to run its search teams.
Server Logs and AI Crawlers
He told the podcast that he had not heard of any site losing less than half its search traffic over the previous 18 months to two years, though the visitors who still arrived tended to convert better. Because AI assistants offered no analytics, he went to the server logs to see which AI bots came to a site, what files they downloaded, and how often they returned. "Server logs have always been a magical place to go," he said. "It's a record of an actual ping, of an actual handshake between one server and another server."
He also warned that the chat tools had already read most company websites. "ChatGPT has already consumed all of your website. They consumed it before you started worrying about it," he said. His advice was to approach the change with curiosity, and he compared the moment to the early days of social media, when nobody was yet an expert. At Victorious he has written on how AI systems split one query into several related questions before choosing what to cite.